Fantasy, The Moral Imagination and The Good

Towards or Back to Human Values? Spiritual and Moral Dimension of Contemporary Fantasy is a theme formulated so as to reveal a bias and provoke a discussion. The bias is clear in our driving assumption that fantasy literature explores, among others, what it means to be a human being and what constitutes the essence of our humanity. Both of these issues are highly relevant especially now, when life in Western cultures is almost universally experienced as a rapid flux of changing identities, upgradeable technologies, and personal challenges to reinvent oneself in response to the needs of the market. While the seeming randomness of life and the constant pressure to give "becoming" priority over "being" works against the conception of human being and human values as stable concepts, we think that fantasy literature asserts the need to look for those on a personal and collective level.